Life at the Bottom

Theodore Dalrymple. Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

Theodore Dalrymple is an eloquent writer with an important message. He is a physician who has spent much of his career ministering to Great Britain's permanent underclass, an underclass created by progressive-liberal and left-wing ideologies. Dalrymple writes beautifully, so his essays would be a pleasure to read even without their fascinating if unhappy content. His descriptions of the harm that academia, the media, the school system, the state and Britain's left-wing intellectuals have perpetrated on Britain's underclass are likely to catch the reader's attention.

Mr. Dalrymple is a better writer than most liberal media journalists, and his insights are much more interesting, realistic and important. This book is evidence that progressive-liberalism lives on borrowed time. Despite the enormous resources that the British have thrown at progessive education, welfare, housing and universities, the only breakthrough insights about Britain's poor are coming from this lone physician.

Larwyn Is Still Alive

Larwyn and Doug Ross asked me to post this:

Larwyn is not dead yet!
If you haven't been receiving the "Best, Larwyn" collections for the past 3 days, please check that she's not being rejected as spam.

FYI: At approx 6 PM I sent out the collection, subject:
What would 'Will Bill' Donovan do w/ Eclipse & Sat Shoot Down?/ Princeton & Harvard grad take 2 days to spin Speech given TWICE!/If anything ALARMS YOU - Do Not Mention it/.."be very kind to Uncle Castro"/ Beating Obama-Beating Hill


My "collections" are normally sent to my three main lists which I follow up with a confirming "Yr Posts" email letting the bloggers know I've appreciated their posts included in the collection.

Suddenly beginning on Valentine's Day, all collections sent to AOL email addressees were returned to me.

So I pulled the AOL addressees out of all 3 lists and put in segregated group* to make it easier to track returns. Had one brief respite on the 18th. By the 19th Yahoo, HotMail, Cox and other network addresses began being returned to me.

I have the lists broken down as follows
1. 33 contacts
2. 33 contacts
3. 39 contacts in MILBLOG/INTL
*4. 1O AOL addressee contacts (temp list pulled from first three)

Last night subject collection: Email Proves CNN's Sick Bias For Marxist Thugs /OBAMA's GLOBAL POVERTY ACT HR3605 -Biden TRIES RUSH/Kosovo & Denmark/Galen brings tears using Lee Greenwood Lyrics in ALWAYS PROUD/ No one expects to leave the Canadian Inquisition!
was returned as follows:
1. (25) of the 33 sent via Gmail
2. (28) of the 33 sent via Gmail
3 (12) of the 39 sent via Comcast
4 (10) of the 10 sent via Gmail
and 4 of the 16 addressees for the "Yr Posts" confirmation were returned also sent via Gmail.

David Ames Wells on Creative Destruction

Joseph Schumpeter is generally cited as the economist who fashioned the concept of creative destruction in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942. But David Ames Wells wrote this in 1889 in his well known book Recent Economic Changes (p. 31):

"In all commercial history, probably no more striking illustration can be found of the economic principle that nothing marks more clearly the rate of material progress than the rapidity with which that which is old and has been considered wealth is destroyed by the results of new inventions and discoveries."

In a footnote Wells quotes Edward Atkinson:

"'In the last analysis it will appear that there is no such thing as fixed capital; there is nothing useful that is very old except the precious metals, and all life consists in the conversion of forms. The only capital which is of permanent value is immaterial--the experience of generations and the development of science.'"

David Ames Wells on the Depression of 1873, George W. Bush and Today's Fed Policy

David Ames Wells, whom Abraham Lincoln first appointed to public office, was commissioner of revenue in the late 1860s and was a consultant to the nascent railroad industry. He became an advocate of free trade, a Mugwump supporter of President Grover Cleveland and an advocate of hard money.

In 1889 he copyrighted Recent Economic Changes. In the introduction he notes:

"The existence of a most curious and in many respects unprecedented disturbance and depression of trade, commerce and industry, which, first manifesting itself in a marked degree in 1873, has prevailed with fluctuations of intensity up to the present time (1889), is an economic and social phenomenon that has been everywhere recognized. Its most noteworthy peculiarity has been its universality...the maximum of economic disturbance has been experienced in those countries in which the employment of machinery, the efficiency of labor, the cost and standard of living and the extent of popular education are the greatest...It is also universally admitted that the years immediately precedent to 1873--i.e., from 1869 to 1872--constituted a period of most extraordinary and almost universal inflation of prices, credits and business; which in turn has been attributed to a variety or sequence of influences, such as excessive speculation; excessive and injudicious construction of railroads...the opening of the Suez Canal...the Franco-German War; and the payment of the war indemnity which Germany extracted from France...Under date of March 1873, the London Economist in its review of the commercial history of the preceding year, says:

"'Of all events of the year 1872, the profound economic changes generated by the rise of prices and wages in this country, in Central and Western Europe, and in the United States, have been the most full of moment.'"

And the London Engineer under date of February 1873 thus further comments on the situation:

'...In 1872 scarcely a single step in advance was made in the science or practice of mechanical engineering. No one had time to invent, or improve, or try new things...'" (emphasis in the original).